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Measuring Anti-Indigenous Attitudes: The Indigenous Resentment Scale

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel Indigenous resentment scale to measure anti-Indigenous attitudes in settler-colonial societies. I draw from existing quantitative research on measuring outgroup attitudes, Indigenous philosophy, and settler-colonial scholarship to develop a concept and measure of settlers’ resentment toward Indigenous peoples (settlers’ “Indigenous resentment”) with high construct validity. I test the Indigenous resentment scale using original and nationally representative survey data. I conduct a reliability analysis and use statistical learning techniques to show that the Indigenous resentment scale is internally consistent and unidimensional, and has high theoretical construct validity. As I show, the Indigenous resentment scale is a strong predictor of social avoidance behaviors and significantly predicts opposition to government policies designed to help Indigenous peoples. I explain how the Indigenous resentment scale improves upon existing attempts to measure anti-Indigenous attitudes and discuss the usefulness of the scale in social scientific research.

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Notes

  1. Although see Jardina and Piston (2019) for a discussion of the endurance of biological racist beliefs.

  2. Research also convincingly shows that the structure of racial prejudice is (approximately) lexically ordered and unidimensional, meaning different operationalizations of racial attitudes are tapping into the same latent trait of racial antipathy (Neblo 2009a). For instance, opposition to affirmative action, opposition to the equal treatment of Black people, and explicit opposition to integration or intermarriage do not constitute separate types of racism, rather they constitute opposite ends of a lexically-ordered underlying concept of racism. More people likely oppose affirmative action (the “easier” item) and fewer people oppose intermarriage (the “harder” item). However, people who oppose intermarriage (people who agree to the more discriminating item) also tend to oppose affirmative action and are less likely to endorse the equal treatment of Black citizens. What is heterogeneous is the causal structure driving opinions about race politics (Neblo 2009b). The debate about the relationship between old fashioned and symbolic racism goes is beyond the scope of this paper. The goal of this paper is to simply to construct a reliable, valid, and unidimensional Indigenous resentment scale.

  3. Although there is evidence that “old fashioned” racist beliefs have not completely disappeared and may even be enjoying a resurgence (Jardina and Piston 2019).

  4. Only one scale, the “Australian Symbolic Racism Scale,” considers any questions about land (Fraser and Islam 2000). The Australian Symbolic Racism Scale includes one item that asks respondents whether: “Native Title should be extinguished where it would hold up major mining projects which would produce major benefits to the Australian economy” (Fraser and Islam 2000, p. 136, Appendix A). Unfortunately, this question asks about very specific policy—abolishing land title when title would hold up a major project that would benefit the Australian economy—and does not tap into more general attitudes about the principle of land rights. As such, this item is not useful outside the Australian context. Note also that The Australian Symbolic Racism Scale is not a measure of anti-Indigenous attitudes specifically, but rather a more general scale of White Australian attitudes that taps into Australians’ attitudes toward a range of non-White, Indigenous, or foreign-born groups of people in Australia.

  5. I initially pre-tested 15 survey items with samples of undergraduate students from two research-intensive universities. The results of the student pre-tests were used to narrow down the number of items (see Supplementary Materials for more detail on pre-testing with student samples).

  6. A note on terminology: Although “Indigenous peoples” is the term “used in international or scholarly discourse,” this term is often less familiar to non-academic audiences (Panel on Research Ethics 2018). In Canada, where the surveys were conducted, the term “Aboriginal” is more commonly used. Following a growing convention, the term “Indigenous” is used in scholarly writing when a global term is appropriate, although the distinct names that peoples use to identify themselves (such as Anishinaabe, Dene, Haida, or Māori) are used whenever possible. In the surveys, the more vernacular Canadian term, “Aboriginals,” was used. The term was defined for respondents the first time it appeared in the surveys.

  7. Creating a relative measure of social avoidance (rather than just a summated scale of Indigenous social avoidance) reduces noise and helps to ensure the scale is tapping into racially-motivated desires for social avoidance. Rather than, for instance, picking up idiosyncratic variation in respondents’ aversion to social contact more generally (e.g., variation in social anxiety/ preferences for being alone).

  8. There was relatively little missing data because study participants were recruited through a professional panel and were paid for completing the study (see Supplementary). Imputing missing values is considered good practice and is preferable to dropping data because multiple imputation accounts for uncertainty, producing more accurate standard errors (Azur et al. 2011). As a robustness check, the models were also estimated with the non-imputed data (dropping missing values through list-wise deletion). The results are not substantively different.

  9. Earlier feedback on this paper included a question asking whether orthogonal or oblique rotation was used. The answer is that rotation was not used. Recall that in factor analysis, the axes can be rotated in m- dimensional space to reduce the correlation between the underlying dimensions (or factors) and clarify the relationship between measures and latent traits. Because the Indigenous resentment scale only has a single factor (\(m=\)1), there is nothing to rotate.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Ashley Jardina for supervising my Banting Fellowship at Duke University, where I completed this project. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Archon Fung and the participants of the Ash Center Democracy Group for creating a stimulating and supportive community while I worked on this project during my Visiting Democracy Fellowship at Harvard University. I also thank Dietlind Stolle and the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC), where I started this project. This paper draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, a Henry “Hank” Heitowit Scholarship to attend the ICPSR Summer Program, and was partly funded by a CSDC Seed Grant. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and KJ Dakin for copy-editing.

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Beauvais, E. Measuring Anti-Indigenous Attitudes: The Indigenous Resentment Scale. Race Soc Probl 13, 306–319 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-021-09317-4

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